Critics reviews

It marked a return to the energetic, stylistically thrilling crime genre filmmaking that first made the director's name. While its expansive, sunlit, West Coast take on shadowy, claustrophic film noir – soundtracked by the lush, pulsing pop music of Wang Chung – refuses many readymade clichés, the film retains striking, sometimes unexpected connections to the cinematic past.

The fashions and music and attitudes on display might have been interpreted at the time as opportunistic stabs at au courant stylization, but the film is nevertheless overpowering and otherworldly rather than quaint or kitschy. It feels like a transmission from a different planet. To Live and Die in L.A. is so of its time that you can only be captivated by it.

The film cannily blends quasi-documentary procedural realism with an unpredictable modernist sensibility. The story is succinct in its pulpy purity... To Live and Die in L.A. exhibits a remarkable degree of kineticism, evident in several memorable chase sequences, the film's headlong momentum abetted by Wang Chung's dynamic score.

The film throws a new neon lighting scheme on old 'copsand crooks are alike' themes, while the against-oncoming-traffic car chase is the stuff of legend, a clear gambit to one-up The French Connection (1971), and sure evidence that Friedkin's stiffest competition was himself.